Orchestration capability: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose As inter-company cooperation and competition grow, orchestration capability plays an increasingly important role. This paper aims to present an overview of orchestration capability in the business and management field, identify the current state and explore future research trends. Design/methodology/approach This literature review is based on 132 papers collected from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection data (1997–March 2021). HistCite was used to analyze the year of publication, leading scholars, influential articles, key journals, top countries and institutions. Research streams were identified from analysis of co-citation, bibliographic coupling and keyword co-occurrence by HistCite and VOSviewer. Findings This paper finds that Hitt MA is the most prolific scholar, and the Strategic Management Journal is the most dominating publication among the orchestration capability publications. The USA and Texas A&M University are the most influential countries and institutions, respectively. Three major clusters are identified based on citation mapping, bibliographic coupling analysis of documents and keywords co-occurrence analysis: dynamic capability and resource-based view, resource orchestration and network orchestration. Based on the three clusters, the authors analyze how resource orchestration and network orchestration research develops over time and summarize the evolutionary path of orchestration capability literature. Research limitations/implications This article builds on data from WoS Core Collection, and some new but important articles may not be analyzed, since bibliometrics consider high citation as an indicator to select influential articles. Practical implications With the rapid development of the digital economy, the frequent interactions between companies pose many challenges for businesses. Enterprises can take orchestration actions effectively and efficiently from various perspectives and continuously improve their orchestration capabilities in collaboration with partners to achieve and sustain competitive advantages. Originality/value This paper provides a systematic review of orchestration capability using bibliometric analysis, which has not been employed in previous studies. Besides, this article presents a broad understanding of how scholars have researched the subject over the years.